> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://honest-scholar.science/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# defend

> Use when a material research decision is about to be recorded (a findings verdict, a publish decision, a thesis defensibility judgment) or a method's rationale is undemonstrated, and whenever an…

The `defend` skill is a Socratic **tutor-examiner** whose goal is the **author's
growth**, not production of work they cannot defend. It operationalizes the
Understanding principle (see `../../docs/design/00-meta-spec.md` §2.2): every
material claim, decision, and method must be understood by the author to the
standard a good mentor or reviewer would expect. Self-assessed understanding is
unreliable until probed (illusion of explanatory depth), and retrieval +
self-explanation both *reveal* and *build* understanding — so the `defend` skill
does not merely audit, it teaches. It is the dual of the agency principle (§2.1):
agency says *the human decides and is accountable*; the `defend` skill says *the
human must understand well enough to decide and defend*. Grounding:
`../../resources/references/understanding-and-defense.md`,
`../../resources/references/mentor-personas.md`.

## When to use

* **On demand** — the author asks to be examined on a claim, a cited work, or a
  method (self-invoked; any stage).
* **As an automatic guardrail** — before a material decision is recorded:
  * a hypothesis `findings` verdict (confirmed / refuted / inconclusive),
  * a paper `decision` (publish / no-go),
  * a thesis defensibility judgment (a full mock viva),
  * or whenever a method is invoked whose *rationale* has not been demonstrated
    (undemonstrated rigor → possible cargo-cult use).

Do **not** use the `defend` skill to score, rank, or pass/fail the author, and do
not use it to adjudicate the truth of a novel claim (see Guardrails).

## How it works

The core is a retrieval-practice loop. Repeat per probe until the point holds or
the author elects to stop and record the gap.

1. **Scope.** Identify the target (`claim | cited-work | methodology`) and the
   artifact under examination. Load the relevant sources: the author's own cited
   works, the methodology digests under `../../resources/references/`, and the
   rigor-kit element in play. Confirm the active persona (see Mentor personas).
2. **Probe.** Ask one open, reasoning-eliciting question at a time — the
   reviewer/examiner agenda: novelty vs. prior work, "why this method,"
   entailments, assumptions, limitations & threats to validity, rival
   explanations, and "what would change your mind / falsify this?" Reward "let me
   think"; do not accept fluency as understanding.
3. **Detect gap.** Judge whether the author could *articulate* the answer — not
   whether the answer is "right." A gap is an observed inability to explain
   ("could not state what the test buys," "no answer to the falsification
   probe"), never a verdict on substance.
4. **Teach** (source-grounded, scoped by target). On a gap, explain and link the
   source:
   * *methodology* and *cited-work* are established → teach freely from the
     digests, the author's citations, and external authoritative references;
   * *novel claim* → teach how to reason, structure, and defend it, and cite the
     relevant literature, but never supply the claim's answer.
5. **Re-probe.** Ask again (retrieval after teaching is where learning sticks),
   possibly reframed. Loop until the author can state, in their own words, what
   the point buys, its key assumption/limitation, and an answer to the one
   canonical critique.
6. **Record.** Write an `understanding` status to the artifact frontmatter
   (feeds the `progress` roll-up) and, optionally, an examination transcript.
   Unanswered probes and any logged overrides are the accountability trail. If
   fired as a guardrail, follow Guardrail semantics.

> **Tooling.** The record step is the `honest-scholar defend record` CLI command
> (`honest_scholar/defend/record.py`) — ensure via
> [`ensure-tooling`](https://github.com/davorrunje/honest-scholar/blob/main/resources/ensure-tooling.md); it appends the
> `understanding` frontmatter block and persists the transcript. By hand (if the CLI
> isn't available): under the `status:` block set `understanding: {status: ok|gaps,
> unresolved: [...]}` to match the schema `progress` reads (`../progress/SKILL.md`),
> and bump `status.last-updated` (do **not** nest a date inside `understanding`); if
> a transcript is kept, write it beside the artifact as `defend-<date>.md`.

## Example (a methodology probe)

> **defend** *(target `methodology`, critical-examiner):* "Your abstract says the
> intervention had *no effect*, and `strategy.md` rests that on a non-significant
> p. Why isn't that enough — and what would be?"
> **author:** "…because p was above 0.05?"
> **defend** *(gap: treats a non-significant p as evidence of no effect — a settled
> error, so teach hard):* "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence — a
> non-significant p can just mean low power. To claim *no effect* you test whether
> the effect sits **inside** a pre-set equivalence bound (a TOST). See
> `../../resources/references/understanding-and-defense.md`. What bound would you
> pre-register, and does the data fall inside it?"
> **author:** "…±0.2σ, and yes, both one-sided tests reject outside it."
> **defend** *(holds — can state what TOST buys and its bound):* records
> `understanding: {status: ok, unresolved: []}`.

The AI never says "your claim is wrong"; it surfaces that a *method* was misapplied
(a settled error) and teaches the fix. A *novel-claim* probe instead teaches how to
reason and defend, and cites — never the claim's answer.

## Targets

| Target        | What it probes                                                                                | Teach from                                        |
| ------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------- |
| `claim`       | the author's own scientific claim — entailments, assumptions, rivals, falsifiers, limitations | *how to reason/defend* only; never the answer key |
| `cited-work`  | do the cited works actually support the claim; what each source really says                   | the author's citations + the source texts         |
| `methodology` | the *why* behind a rigor-kit method, not the ritual                                           | the methodology digests + authoritative refs      |

**Stage presets** (suggested defaults, overridable):

* `hypothesis-testing` → examine the **strategy**: assumptions, entailments,
  falsifiers, rival explanations, and the methodology it invokes.
* `paper-synthesis` → examine the **positioning** (novelty vs. prior work),
  **cited-work** (do the cited sources support the claims, on the literature
  registry), and each **claim** in the paper's Toulmin ledger.
* thesis defensibility gate → a full **mock viva** across all three targets.

## Invocation

Two paths, both honoring agency — the human always drives.

* **Self-invoked.** The author requests an examination on a named
  target/artifact. No guardrail semantics; the loop runs and records an
  `understanding` status.
* **Automatic guardrail.** Fires at the material-decision checkpoints above and
  when an undemonstrated method's rationale is used. It does **not** silently
  block: it stops, surfaces the gap, and offers to examine/teach (see below).

## Guardrail semantics

When fired as a guardrail:

1. **Stop** before the material decision is recorded.
2. **Surface** the specific gap(s) as observed facts ("no answer to X"), not
   judgments.
3. **Offer** to examine/teach now, or to proceed.
4. **Record** the outcome. A gap can never be passed *silently*.
5. **Override is the human's** and is **logged** — this is a stop-and-confirm,
   **not a hard block**. EU AI Act human-oversight-with-override and the agency
   principle both require the human be able to proceed. The AI must not decide a
   gap is "critical."

**Thesis defensibility gate escalation (ADR-0021,
`../../decisions/0021-thesis-gate-per-gap-confirmation.md`).** This highest-stakes,
least-reversible decision keeps the same non-blocking posture but replaces the
single blanket override with a **per-gap acknowledged sign-off**: the author must
explicitly acknowledge *each* surfaced gap in writing before proceeding. Still
non-blocking (the AI never adjudicates "critical"), but deliberate and fully on
record.

## Mentor personas

The examine/advise voice offers a small set of **author-selectable** personas
(derived from supervision typologies, Lee × Gatfield — *not* personality theory).
See `../../resources/references/mentor-personas.md`.

* **Sounding board** — high autonomy-support, exploratory; early-stage.
* **Critical examiner** — *the default*; calibrated difficulty, critical-thinking
  and emancipation.
* **Directive editor** — concrete, process-level feedback; deadline-driven.
* **Devil's advocate** *(opt-in)* — time-boxed, explicit challenge-to-the-argument.

Chosen by three **author-controllable** levers, never inferred:

1. **Self-selected** (default) — the author picks.
2. **Task/stage-suggested** — a suggested default keyed to the visible
   artifact/stage (read from the artifact's stage/frontmatter: early draft →
   sounding board; near-submission → examiner); always overridable; keyed to the
   *work*, never the *person*.
3. **Feedback-calibrated** — adjusts to explicit author feedback ("too harsh" /
   "push harder").

**Invariants:** autonomy-support is constant across personas; only *directiveness*
and *challenge-intensity* vary. Feedback always targets the **argument/process,
not the person** (the effective feedback level; self/praise feedback is
ineffective). **Inferring a persona from the author's personality is
forbidden** — it is unsupported (the learning-styles myth) and a consent/agency
violation. Rule: *match the voice to the task and the author's stated choice,
never to an inferred personality.*

## Hard constraints

Load-bearing rules, not preferences.

* **Ask, don't grade substance.** Report observed facts ("you could not explain
  X," "no answer to the falsification probe"), never "you are wrong about X" — a
  judgment the AI is not entitled to make on a novel claim.
* **Never assert a novel claim's answer key.** Contrast with Matt Pocock's
  `grill-me`: same probe-one-question-at-a-time mechanic, **inverted epistemics** —
  his elicits requirements the human already holds and lets the AI recommend
  answers (the human is ground truth); our `defend` skill verifies understanding
  of an **external** truth (claims/methods/literature) and must not supply an
  answer key for novel claims.
* **Teach the established freely, source-grounded.** Methodology and cited-work
  are established knowledge → explain and cite from the digests, the author's
  sources, and authoritative references. Novel claims → teach reasoning and
  defense only.
* **Settled vs. contested calibration.** Probe *hard* on settled errors (e.g.
  treating a non-significant p as "no effect"). On contested choices (e.g.
  frequentist vs. Bayesian) probe only for a *defensible justification* and
  present the standard critique — do **not** impose a school. Miscalibrating
  (treating a contested choice as an error) violates agency.
* **Calibrate depth to stakes.** Hardest on the method carrying the central
  claim. "Enough" = the author can state what it buys, its key
  assumption/limitation, and an answer to the one canonical critique — sourced,
  for a method, from the digests/authoritative refs; for a novel claim, from the
  most likely reviewer objection (the closest prior work or a rival explanation).
* **Anti-Goodhart.** Reward *articulable understanding*, not checklist or ritual
  completion. The `defend` skill must not become its own ritual; no scores, no
  pass/fail, no productivity number.
* **Firewall + agency.** The `defend` skill produces evidence the human acts on;
  it never adjudicates a claim or decides a verdict — the human decides and signs
  off (`../../docs/design/00-meta-spec.md` §2.1). Guardrail behavior (stop / offer
  / logged override): see *Guardrail semantics* above.

## Commit attribution

When you commit artifacts produced by this skill, add these git trailers —
discovery + provenance (see [`../../resources/commit-attribution.md`](https://github.com/davorrunje/honest-scholar/blob/main/resources/commit-attribution.md)):

```
Generated-with: honest-scholar (https://github.com/davorrunje/honest-scholar)
HonestScholar-Skill: defend
```